


Crushing Grip

by thistidalwave



Category: Supernatural
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-29
Updated: 2012-07-29
Packaged: 2017-11-11 00:47:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,641
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/472594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thistidalwave/pseuds/thistidalwave
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The building blocks for Sam and Dean’s insane, twisted, and erotic codependency are two people very much in love and the lengths they would go to for each other. Their atoms are made up by the road, by shiny bright diners and smoky bars, by holding their breath when they pass by cemeteries in an attempt not to breathe in an evil spirit, unaware that they already have demons hiding in the recesses of their souls, planted there before they were even born." </p>
<p>A love story told in road maps, bars, and graveyard dirt.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crushing Grip

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the spn_j2_bigbang. You can also read it on [LJ](http://teaboytoaliens.livejournal.com/10607.html#cutid1) or [download the PDF.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QhVPFFhTTShQIynkRehkDQBXiVpvgujePcy6-jMKwKk/edit)
> 
> This story is an expansion on the canon universe. It assumes you have (and relies upon you having) basic canon knowledge from seasons 1 - 5 by referencing the occurrence of canon events but essentially not elaborating on the details of their resolution. Everything that happens in canon also happens in this fic universe. Therefore! Spoilers up to the end of season five.
> 
> The title is a play on the title of Richard Siken's Crush, which all of the poetry quotes you see in the story are from, and it's meant to be representative of the hold that Sam and Dean have on each other, physically and metaphorically, which is basically the whole theme of the fic.
> 
> Be sure to [check out the art](http://marciaelena.livejournal.com/311287.html) by marciaelena that goes with this fic, too.

  


**.**

The Winchesters’ story starts out a bit like a romantic comedy written by Nicholas Sparks, only with more monsters--two lovers, a boy and a girl, one just back from the war and the other trapped by her family, run away together and start their own family. Everything is happy, life is perfect, and then six months after their second child is born, the woman burns to death on the ceiling and the man sets out to avenge her.

Sparks has a thing for tragedy. They say it’s why he’s so popular--people just can’t get enough of watching fictional characters suffer.

But the Winchesters are not fictional. They are real, and the demons that chase them are real, too. The people that they save from certain death are real, and the bond between two boys that will one day transcend everything in the known universe is real.

The building blocks for Sam and Dean’s insane, twisted, fucked up, and erotic codependency are two people very much in love and the lengths they would go to for each other. Their atoms are made up by the road, by shiny bright diners and smoky bars, by holding their breath when they pass by cemeteries in an attempt not to breathe in an evil spirit, unaware that they already have demons hiding in the recesses of their souls, planted there before they were even born.

It’s no surprise, really, that the brothers would grow up to be just like their mom and dad--they are family, after all.

**.1**

Sammy is four the first time he consciously decides that he wants to be just like his big brother. Dean is helping John clean the Impala at a carwash by a gas station while Sam pokes at bugs in the dirt at the edge of the parking lot. John is telling Dean something Sam can’t hear, something about the car, and pointing to a spot that Dean missed wiping with his rag.

Sam is jealous. He wants to be the one John teaches about the car. Bugs are cool, but the Impala is infinitely cooler.

John crouches down and says something to Dean, gesturing to Sam. Dean looks solemn, nods. John walks away, toward the gas station, and when he’s out of sight, Dean drops his rag in the bucket and trots over to Sam.

“Hey, Sammy,” he says. “Didja find any cool bugs?”

Sam shrugs.

“Come with me,” Dean says, and grabs Sam’s hand, pulling him toward the car. “Dad said I have to keep an eye on you. I wanna show you the Impala.”

“‘ve seen the Impala,” Sam says, concentrating on not stumbling over his feet in his attempt to keep up.

“Not like this, y’haven’t. Dad says keeping a car clean is important if you want her to be happy. See, you wipe off the dust and stuff like this.” He demonstrates. “You try.” He hands Sam the rag, and Sam carefully wipes away mostly imaginary specks of dirt from the side of the car, going over and over the same spot. “Nah, Sammy, you have to get more than one spot,” Dean mentors.

“Okay,” Sam agrees, moving to the right.

“Dad says the car is real important to our way of life, and if we lose the car, we’re screwed,” Dean continues while Sam moves in concentric circles across the chrome. It occurs to Sam that Dean is repeating everything he hadn’t been able to hear John say. It makes him happy, and he smiles up at Dean. Dean smiles back, then says, “I have an idea.” He crouches down and takes the rag away from Sam, putting it back in the bucket. “You know how we write our initials in our school stuff?” He waits for Sam to nod. “We should write them on the car, too, so that we don’t lose her.”

It makes perfect sense to Sam, so he nods excitedly.

And that’s how the Impala ends up with _S.W. D.W._ carved into it with a Swiss army knife while John Winchester stands in an annoyingly long line for a shitty gas station restroom, and how Sam comes to the conclusion that the Impala is cool, but Dean is infinitely cooler.

Dean is bored. Pastor Jim is at the front of the congregation, talking about something like respecting your neighbours, telling a story from the Bible--Dean doesn’t know because he tuned out a good ten minutes ago in favour of staring at the stained glass window.

He’s always liked stained glass windows. He likes how the light looks when it’s filtered through them, broken into colourful pieces. He doesn’t really care about the scene it’s depicting--the one with Jesus and the sheep and the quote about lying down in green pastures--preferring to instead admire the sort of craftsmanship one obviously needs to make something like that. He fancies that one day, when he’s older, he can create stained glass windows with impressive scenes on them, the kind that everyone likes, not just people who go to church.

Beside Dean in the pew, Sammy wiggles in his seat, mumbles something to himself. John, on his other side, shushes him. Sam pouts. Dean can tell he’s on the verge of having a breakdown in the middle of the sermon.

Dean leans across his brother and taps John on the thigh. “Can I take Sam out in the lobby?” he whispers.

John looks over at him, down at his watch, sighs and nods. “Don’t eat all the cookies this time,” he warns.

“Cookies!” Sam stage whispers.

“We won’t,” Dean assures his father, taking Sam’s hand and helping him hop off the pew. They make their way across the back of the church to the exit, ignoring the looks they get from a few people.

“Cookies?” Sam says again when they’re in the lobby.

Dean nods. “They’re over here,” he says, tugging Sam over to the refreshments table. He grabs an oatmeal cookie off the tray and hands it to Sam, then digs a sugar cube out of the box next to the coffee pot and pops it into his mouth.

“Hey, Dean?” Sam asks through a mouthful of cookie.

“Swallow before you talk,” Dean says. “What?”

“The girls at preschool were playing at getting married, and Cassie wanted to marry me,” Sam says. “But I didn’t want to get married to her and when I said that she asked who I did want to marry.”

Dean scrunches his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

Sam nods. “Yeah.”

Dean waits, but when Sam doesn’t say anything else, prompts him with, “Who did you say you wanted to marry, then?”

Sam frowns. “I said you, and Cassie said Dean sounded like it was a boy’s name and I couldn’t marry a boy.”

Dean stares at his little brother. “You can’t marry me, Sammy.”

Sam’s face falls, as if he had been expecting Dean to contradict what Cassie had told him. “Why not?”

“Because I’m your brother. It’s illegal.”

“Why?”

“Because brothers aren’t supposed to get married,” Dean says. “You can’t tell anyone about that anymore, okay, Sam? It’s like when we live in a motel and we can’t tell anyone because they’ll think Dad’s a bad parent, okay?”

Sam looks upset, but he nods. “Okay.”

“Do you want to go out in the cemetery and play hide and seek? Dad will be in here talking to people for a while after the service is over.”

“Can I have another cookie first?”

Dean smiles at the hopeful look on Sam’s face. “Sure,” he says. _Anything to keep that smile on his face,_ he thinks as he hands over another cookie.

They’re sitting at the table in the motel room, The Flintstones on the TV in the background, their homework spread out in front of them. Sam is staring at the TV, chewing on his thumb, and Dean is staring at his worksheet, wondering who decided any of this was relevant to anything. It’s definitely not going to help him kill the things that go bump in the night.

“What’ve you got for homework?” he asks Sam.

Sam looks over to him, sits up and flips his paper around so that Dean can look at it. It’s a matching worksheet about colours, which colour with which colour makes another, basic first grade art stuff. Dean is finished doing it in his head by the time he’s read it. He wishes his homework was that easy.

“Do you need help?” he asks. Sam shrugs, takes his paper back and flips it around. He starts doodling on the paper, shading over the green circle with his pencil. Dean watches him until he gets halfway across and then says, “Sam? What colours make green?”

“Blue and yellow,” Sam says immediately.

“Purple?”

“Blue and red.”

Dean frowns. “If you know how to do the worksheet, why aren’t you finished with it?”

“‘Cause it doesn’t matter,” Sam explains. “The teacher is going to go over it in class and we’ll all get three outta three, so whatever.”

“I wish school was that easy for me,” Dean says.

“It’s just art that’s dumb like that,” Sam says. “My other homework is actually marked by the teacher, but I finished everything else in class. What’re you working on?”

“Social studies. Aztec civilization.”

“Sounds cool,” Sam says, and then goes back to watching The Flintstones.

Dean sighs. He wishes his biggest concerns were watching TV and not doing a worksheet that will take no time just because he thinks it’s pointless, rather than what they’re going to have for supper later and when or if their father is going to get back.

He stacks his homework neatly and tucks it back in his bag. He’ll work on it later, when Sam is sleeping, maybe. “Do your homework,” he tells Sam. “I’m going out to get supper for later. Don’t move from that chair.”

“Okay, Dean,” Sam says, still staring at the TV.

“I mean it, Sammy,” Dean warns from by the door.

“Okay, Dean,” Sam repeats. Dean can tell he’s just doing it to be a brat, so he ignores it and leaves.

He shoves his hands in the pockets of his jacket, hunches against the cold autumn breeze, and wishes he didn’t have to be the one who told Sam to do homework and worried about everything. He wishes he could go back to when he was little, back to when he had a house and a mother and a father who might leave for work in the morning, but always came back at the same time every day.

It’s dusk and they’re in a graveyard. It should be scary--the trees and the stone monuments to those long dead cast shadows across the cemetery and a cold wind is blowing--but Sam is sitting calmly under a tree, watching his father and brother dig up the grave of a violent spirit that’s been haunting a restored house on the edge of town. He’d offered to help, but Dean had sat him under the tree and told him to read his book. There’s a shotgun within reach. Sam’s not supposed to take an active role in the hunt, but there’s an unspoken order (from both his brother and his father) to shoot if he has to.

His book isn’t very interesting--he’s already read it, a year or so ago, and he hadn’t liked it then and he doesn’t like it now that he has to read it for class. It isn’t very interesting, so he’s been on the same page for ages now, and he’s watching Dean instead of reading. He entertains the idea of trying to figure out how much of his life is taken up by watching Dean, but quickly abandons it. It would be hours, days, months, the entirety of the time his eyes are open.

Dean hauls himself up out of the grave, claps his hands together to brush off the dirt, and swaggers all sixteen years of his gangly form over to Sam. “How’s it going, little bro?” he asks, pulling a water bottle out of the bag resting next to Sam.

“It’s going,” Sam replies, struck by a sudden fascination with Dean’s hands. They’re black with dirt, but the patchwork colour serves to accentuate the structure of them, the delicate bones framed with strong muscles. Strong hands that can dig up graves, fend off bullies, shoot with respectable accuracy. Tender hands that sometimes still tuck Sam into bed at night, doodle graceful patterns in the margins of Sam’s homework, dance across Sam’s skin in cautious comfort when he’s sick or injured or upset.

“What are you looking at?”

“Nothing,” Sam says. “Your hands.”

Dean nods, caps the water bottle and tosses it back in the bag. “Pretty gross, huh? Lucky you, sitting over here all clean.” He moves toward Sam, hands outstretched as if to remedy that problem, and Sam ducks away.

“Dad’ll be mad,” Sam warns. Dean snorts.

“Just a little dirt,” he says. “Never hurt no one.” As if to prove it he moves, quick, and smears dirt on the tip of Sam’s nose. Sam crosses his eyes to look down at it and wrinkles his nose.

“Anyone,” he corrects, wiping at his face. “Never hurt anyone.”

“Smart ass,” Dean says, but he’s smiling, as if Sam being a smart ass is his own personal accomplishment. "We're almost done. Bitch'll be ashes soon. You keep a lookout, okay?"

Sam nods at Dean's retreating back, glances at the shotgun out of the corner of his eye just to make sure it's still there. He watches as Dean stops at the edge of the grave, looking down. The breeze blows conversation at Sam, but the syllables are mixed up so that Sam can't hear the exact words. John hauls himself out of the grave and a shaky image of a girl long dead flickers into existence, closer to Sam than John and Dean. He jumps, fumbles for the gun as she shrieks something about her revenge and flashes in and out of sight as she moves toward Dean, who's digging in his pocket, for matches, no doubt, and the ghost disappears two yards from her grave, salt round from John’s gun through her chest.

Sam’s hands are clenched around the shotgun; he’s standing now, rolling forward on the balls of his feet in anticipation. Dean is trying to strike a match, cursing, and John is standing guard next to him, gun at the ready.

The ghost appears again, just behind Dean now, arms outstretched, and before he’s consciously thought about it, Sam is shooting, and Dean’s match catches fire and drops onto the bones. The ghost goes up in flames to a chorus of screaming and Dean whooping, hands upraised in victory. Sam breathes a sigh of relief, grip on the gun loosening.

“Good shot, Sam,” John tells him later, back at the motel. “It’s a good thing we had you for back up when my gun jammed.”

Sam hadn’t even known John had tried to fire a second time, but he nods anyway. He can’t think of any place he’d rather be than backing up his family, can’t think of any reason he would be somewhere he couldn’t be Dean’s hands when his own failed him, so yes, that he was there is a good thing, will always be a good thing.

The fireworks are blue, purple, red, bright and flashing and beautiful. They don’t even compare to the smile on Sam’s face, the way Dean’s heart flutters unnaturally when Sam looks over at him.

“Ready?” Sam asks, lighter in one hand, leaning down to the firework he’s set up carefully. “It’s the last one.”

“Light ‘er up,” Dean says. Sam flicks the lighter, holds it to the firework until the spark catches, and then steps back, covers his ears. Only the firework doesn’t shriek into the sky--it fizzles and pops, and then suddenly the grass is on fire and Dean is swearing and pulling at Sam’s arm. They run to the edge of the field, looking back to see flame spreading across the ground, black smoke drifting upward.

Dean glances at Sam, sees that Sam is looking at him with eyes open wide in shock, and Dean laughs because he’d said, he’d made Sam promise that they’d be careful with the fireworks, it had been part of Sam’s reasoning as to why Dean should buy them, they had been determined not to start a fire, and then _the very last one_ sets the fucking field on fire.

“Are you okay?”

“We set it on fire,” Dean gasps out in the middle of his laughter. “We set the damn field on fire.”

Sam stares at Dean for a moment, wonders if Dean has maybe inhaled some sort of grass fumes--and then he starts laughing, too, because plain old grass doesn’t exactly give off fumes.

Dean slings an arm around Sam’s shoulder, still chuckling a bit. “You’re so stupid, Sammy.”

“What? You’re the jerk who bought the fireworks,” Sam says indignantly, pushing at Dean’s side.

“Shut up, bitch, I’m not the one who couldn’t light them properly,” Dean shoots back. “Besides, you _begged_ to be allowed to get fireworks.” He pitches his voice into a high falsetto. “‘Come on, Dean, it’s the fourth of July. Everyone _else_ gets fireworks! Dean, I wanna set off fireworks! Dean, you’re eighteen, buy fireworks!’”

“I do _not_ talk like that.”

“Yeah, you do.” Dean looks at the field, then back at Sam’s face, now set in a pout. “Cheer up. You just set a field on fire. How cool is that?”

Sam looks at the burning field thoughtfully. “It is pretty cool,” he concedes, then coughs on a breath full of smoke. “We should probably get out of here.”

Dean brushes away a smudge of soot on Sam’s cheek, admires the way the distant flicker of the firelight plays across Sam’s face, has to blink and remind himself that he can’t take advantage of his little brother no matter how much he wants to.

“Dean?” Sam’s voice is quiet, questioning, and Dean is immediately on guard.

“Hm?”

Sam shrugs out from under Dean’s arm, wraps both of his own around Dean’s waist and rests his head on Dean’s chest. “Thanks for the fireworks.”

Dean hugs Sam back, rests his cheek against the top of his head. His hair brushes roughly against Dean’s cheek and a lump builds in Dean’s throat, thinking about how he’s so lucky to have Sammy, how he’s so unlucky that he can’t have Sammy the way he wants.

“You’re welcome,” he tells Sam, and he means it, thinks that if he had a choice between his Sam and a different Sam, one that wasn’t his brother, he’d pick his Sam every time, even if it hurts.

**.2**

Sam is fourteen. He’s going to be turning fifteen in two weeks, but right now he’s fourteen and he’s standing in a gas station, the kind of gas station with lights that flicker overhead and permanently dirty floors that are coated in various sticky substances. It’s five blocks from the rundown trailer they’re staying in on the wrong side of town until John decides to take a job cross country and forces them to move. That blessedly isn’t going to happen anytime soon; John left for a hunt he’d found in the city that morning.

Sam’s standing in front of the rack of chocolate bars, staring blankly at them, sneakers squeaking against the floor because he can’t stand still, and he realizes what he really wants, what he _really_ wants, is to press Dean up against the corrugated metal on the outside of the building and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him.

He keeps standing where he is, the exact spot he realized beyond a doubt what he’s known all his life: that Dean is the center of the universe and Sam wants him, he wants all of him tucked into his back pocket for safekeeping. He wants to be tucked under Dean’s protective arm forever.

“You know what you want yet, Sam?” Dean asks. He’s standing by the counter holding a bottle of soda, and the cashier is a blonde with legs up to there, tits and a smile to match. Sam watches as Dean shoots her a wink.

“Yeah, I know what I want,” Sam says, grabbing a chocolate bar at random. He waits impatiently just behind Dean while he pays and flirts with the cashier--BRIDGET, her name tag declares. Sam, in that moment, hates Bridget.

Dean is looking at the chocolate bar Sam picked as they walk out of the store, shiny gold wrapper crinkling under his fingers. Twix--Dean’s favourite. “Dude, you’re going to share this with me, right?”

Sam isn’t really paying attention. He’s too busy noting the perfect blue sky, the way the sun beats down on the pavement but the air still has a bit of chill to it so they don’t bake, the quiet hum of small town streets around them. It’s the perfect spring day to realize you’re in love with your brother.

It occurs to Sam that it’s also the perfect spring day to kiss your brother, and instead of answering Dean’s question, he grabs his coat sleeve and pulls him around the corner of the gas station, pushes him into the metal, and makes his fantasies into real life.

He’s not even surprised that Dean immediately kisses back for a moment before pulling away. “Someone could see,” he says, the words tripping over his tongue in their effort to get out.

“No one knows us,” Sam says, and kisses Dean again.

“Was that a yes?” Dean asks when they break apart for the second time, holding up the Twix with two fingers and smirking.

“You can have the whole damn thing,” Sam says. Dean grins.

When you live your life on the road, highway signs practically become a way of life in and of themselves. They vary in size and shape, from orange warning signs to white speed limit signs to huge green signs telling you what city you’re driving into and what services it provides. After a while, John doesn’t even have to be paying any particular attention to the sign to be able to take in exactly what it said and remember it later, and if he didn’t see it, one of the boys did.

Sam teaches himself to read and count with road maps and mile markers, and he starts reading signs out loud for the whole car to hear. As he gets older and can start reading actual books in the car, it stops, but sometimes he gets bored and stares out the window and reads signs.

“Adopt a highway, next two miles,” Sam reads. And then, “Paintball USA, next right.”

They’re not going anywhere in particular--it’s midsummer and they’ve just ditched town after John finished a job that got him police attention, so they’re just driving down the highway, putting distance behind them, and that’s how they find themselves at a paintball park.

“You look ridiculous,” Dean says, laughing at Sam’s gear.

Sam glares at him as he puts on his helmet. “You don’t look any better.”

“Boys,” John says, all business. They shut up and listen to first a bored looking girl spout off the rules, and then their father talk strategy at them. “Every man for himself,” he finishes. “Let’s go.”

Dean waggles his eyebrows in Sam’s direction before snapping his mask over his eyes. Sam makes a face and gestures _I’m watching you_ at him.

There are two other groups playing with them, one of six and another of four, and they look like they’re just there to have a good time.

Ten minutes later, Dean sneaks up behind his brother, who’s hiding behind a barricade in a corner, and pokes him in the back with his paintball gun. “Dead,” he whispers.

Sam glares over his shoulder. “Rules here say you have to actually shoot me.”

Dean shrugs, crouching next to Sam. “How many are left?”

“Dad and one other girl,” Sam says. “You suggesting we team up? Dad said--”

“If you cared, you would have shot me by now. I figure if we wait another minute or so, Dad will get the other girl and then you and I can blindside him.”

Sam nods, moves so he’s sitting on the ground with his back up against the blue plastic. Dean peers around the edge for a second, then says, “How many did you get?”

“How many did _you_ get?” Sam shoots back.

“Three.”

“Four,” Sam says smugly.

Dean punches Sam in the shoulder. “Bitch,” he mutters. “Oh, the chick is walking off. Christ, she’s clear on the other side.”

“Where’s she hit?”

“Headshot. Left side.”

“Think Dad knows where we are?”

“He didn’t see me move over here for sure,” Dean says.

Sam nods. “I’ll draw him over to where you were before.”

Dean fills in the rest of the plan in his head and claps Sam on the shoulder. “Godspeed, little brother,” he says solemnly.

“You’re so full of shit,” Sam says, shoving Dean over and running out onto the field. Dean picks himself up, watches as Sam ducks behind a barricade across the field and just ahead of the one he’s behind.

It takes a minute, but Dean catches sight of John weaving between the barricades, watches as he makes his way from the middle of the field to the other side of Sam’s, where he ducks down. Dean moves out a bit, gestures to Sam to move back.

John starts moving around the side of the barricade. Dean wastes no time in running across the field, takes no care in how much noise he makes, and John hears him just as he gets in range, turns from where he’s aiming at Sam in time to get hit smack in the right side of his chest by Dean’s paintball.

Dean whoops, punching a fist in the air. John rolls his eyes, clicks the safety on his gun on and walks past Dean to exit the field.

“Just you and me now, Sammy,” Dean says. Sam’s standing a good ten or eleven yards away, gun held at the ready. “Gonna shoot me?”

Sam grits his teeth, pulls the trigger. Dean shoots a fraction of a second later, and they stand there staring at each other, matching bright orange splotches of paint over their hearts.

“Dead,” Sam says.

“Wham, bam, thank you, ma’am,” Dean says.

Sam snorts, walks over to Dean and catches him by surprise by hugging him. “That’s later,” he whispers in Dean’s ear, all pressed up against him, and if Dean had thought he was sweating in the California heat earlier, he didn’t know what he was talking about. Sam pulls back, slaps Dean on the shoulder with a grin, and Dean hates his brother.

Later, after they’ve played a couple more rounds and found a motel room to clean up in as well as a diner to eat supper at, John gives them a lecture about listening to what he says while simultaneously complimenting their teamwork. Dean and Sam only half listen, calves pressed together under the table, feet bumping together in their own form of silent smiles that promise so much more.

**.3**

Dean doesn’t put a tape in the cassette deck of the Impala, but the darkness starts to press in around the car where the headlights can’t reach, the silence taking up more space than it deserves, so he turns on the radio. It’s set to some Top 40 station, crooning out a country pop ballad that doesn’t mesh well with the steady roar of the car’s engine. A study in contrasts, like the way John’s eyes told Sam to stay and his mouth told him to walk out that door and never come back, like Dean isn’t saying anything but is screaming _don’t leave, I love you, so you can’t leave, because I love you._

Sam sits, a statue in shotgun, hands folded over the duffle on his lap, and that’s a contrast, too, so different from the picture of anger he’d been not fifteen minutes ago. Nervous, at the start, not sure what their reaction would be to this secret he’s been keeping for months, and then yelling, trying to explain that he wanted normal, he wanted to be normal, he wanted to be like everyone else.

_But we’re not like everyone else, Sammy,_ Dean thinks, but doesn’t say. _We’re not like them. Am I not enough for you?_

He knows he’s not, doesn’t need to ask. Doesn’t want the confirmation, doesn’t know if he could hear it out loud.

He pulls into the Greyhound station parking lot, puts it into park and idles for a moment before shutting it off and looking over at Sam. He’s already getting out of the car. Dean’s heart sinks, his hands shake when they reach for the door handle and miss the first time. He gets out of the car, stares at Sam’s back on the other side of it. He’s not walking away yet, it could still be a joke.

It’s not a joke, he knows, but he doesn’t want to.

Dean walks around the Impala to Sam, touches his shoulder with a tentative hand. “Sammy,” he says, and then he’s being crushed by arms still a bit too long for the body they’re attached to, still a bit awkward, not grown up entirely, but old enough. Old enough to leave. He hugs back, holding on tight like that might make his little brother get back in the car.

His little brother doesn’t get back in the car. He disentangles himself from Dean, nods at him, and walks away.

It’s not a joke. Dean knows.

Dean knocks back another shot, grins up at a mostly naked girl in front of him and leans forward to tuck a dollar bill in the straps of her stiletto shoe. It doesn’t work out so well, the straps are too tight, but she leans down and takes it from him, flashes him with a smile and her tits, so he counts it as a win.

He’s well on his way to totally fucking wasted and feeling pretty great about it. Who needs a little brother? Who needs a father? Who needs--well, actually ganking sons of bitches is pretty great, so he’ll keep that. That and hot chicks. Mmmm, those curves.

Sammy doesn’t have curves. Sammy doesn’t have curves because he’s an _asshole_... with a great ass.

Dean shakes his head, steps away from the stage and pushes his way through the crowded club, purple strobe lights illuminating blurry faces. He needs some air, like right fucking now, and these people are not helping. “Move,” he grunts, his shoulder knocking into a guy who’s at least half a foot taller than him and twice as broad. He looks nice enough, really, but Dean can’t get past him, so he’s stuck with his face nearly crushed into this dude’s back. “Jesus Christ,” he slurs, “you’re taller than Sammy! What are you, a giant?”

Unfortunately, the guy takes offense to that, and Dean finally gets a noseful of fresh air after he gets a nice fist to the face. _Fuckin’ bastard,_ Dean thinks, spitting on the sidewalk and wiping at his nose. He’s bleeding. Fucking fantastic.

He stumbles over to the side of a building, leans his forehead against the brick. He’s starting to feel like being drunk is not so fun, is maybe the stupidest idea he’s had in a while. He looks around--the street is practically deserted save for him and group of women talking down the street a bit.

_Fuck it._ Dean lies down on the sidewalk next to the building and covers his eyes with his hand. He wonders what Sam is doing--it’s a Wednesday night, so he’s probably doing boring college shit, writing a paper or something. Maybe Wednesday night is study group. Maybe he went out for a nice dinner date earlier.

Whatever he’s doing, it’s a far cry from lying piss drunk on the sidewalk outside a strip club in middle America.

“Are you okay?” A female voice above him, worried. He peeks through his fingers, sees her peering down at him.

“M’fine,” he says, closing his eyes. “Thanks.”

“You sure?”

Dean shoots her a thumbs up, lets his arm fall down to his stomach heavily. He hears her shuffle away to rejoin her friends and drags his hands down his face. So much for being a role model for anybody, much less his little brother. Fucking fine job he did there, honestly.

Sam is sitting in the passenger seat of a red Porsche 911, flipping through what looks like a textbook. His girlfriend--or who Dean presumes is his girlfriend, even though she’s a blonde bombshell who is way out of Sam’s league--is inside paying for gas, and Dean is parked around the other side of the station, out of sight, staring at his brother.

He’s supposedly in Virginia right now, hunting a poltergeist, but there isn’t a poltergeist in Virginia that Dean knows about. He’d told his father that so that he didn’t know he was in Palo Alto, visiting his brother. Not that he’s actually doing much visiting. He’s been sitting in this parking lot for hours now, trying to psyche himself up to show up in Sam’s new life and hopefully not ruin it.

He can’t even think of a reason he wouldn’t be ruining it, since Sam had already left him behind, clearly not wanted him, and seeing Sam sitting in that no doubt brand new car, reading his fancy university textbook, living in one place with actual friends and no monsters, doesn’t do anything to reassure him. There’s no place for him here, no matter how much room there is next to him in the Impala or how much he feels like there is a part of him missing.

Dean watches as the girl comes back out of the gas station, jogs over to the car and gets in the driver’s seat, handing Sam a bottle of something. Dean can’t see what it is, but it makes Sam look up and grin at her, and Dean thinks he can hear his heart being ripped out and stomped on. It sounds like the pop music playing the stereo of the Porsche when the blonde turns it on and the phantom laugh of his brother at something his girlfriend said.

They pull out onto the road and in barely a minute Dean can’t even see the Porsche anymore. He feels, all over again, like he did in the parking lot of the bus station when he watched Sam walk away from him.

There’s no way Sam needs him here, and maybe that’s all Dean needed to find out. Maybe he didn’t really need to talk to Sam--just seeing him was good enough, seeing that he was smiling and laughing and living.

It doesn’t feel like enough, though. There probably won’t ever be anything that’s enough, except maybe Sam sitting in the car next to Dean again, fighting side by side with Dean again, being with Dean again. That’s what Dean wants, but if he’s learned one thing in his life, it’s that you can’t always get what you want.

It’s a truth Sam knows all too well, too, and if he thought he spotted the Impala out of the corner of his eye parked beside the gas station, well, he must have been making it up, because Dean isn’t here no matter how much Sam wishes he were. He’s got a girl friend that’s maybe going to be more than just a friend sometime soon handing him his favourite drink, just like he’d told her, and he’s laughing at a joke she made about the cashier hitting on her, but he can’t help but dwell on the fact that he didn’t really want soda right now, he wanted water, and Dean would have known that, and his laugh comes out sounding hollow, and he twists around in his seat to look back even though he’s not really sure why and he can’t even see the gas station anymore.

The table Sam is leaning against is digging into his back, but he doesn’t really want to move. Jessica’s hair smells like lavender and comfort, and he’s quite content to remain here with his nose buried in it.

Jess giggles at something someone said and turns her head to look up at him, smiling. “Are you smelling me?” she asks.

Oh, she was giggling at him. “Yeah,” Sam says. “You smell good.”

She giggles again, tugs herself free of the arms around her waist. “I’m going to get more drinks. You gonna wait here?”

Sam nods, watches her walk over to the bar. He’s pretty sure she doesn’t usually sway her ass like that, but it’s working in that little red dress, so he’s not complaining. She reaches the bar and he lets his eyes wander over the room, triple checking the exits and assessing the patrons for potential danger--just in case. His eye catches on a leather jacket sitting at the bar, male hand wrapped around a glass, spiky brown hair tufting up on his head. Sam frowns. _Dean?_

He pushes his way across the room, apologizing to people he bumps into. “Sam?” he hears Jess ask from behind him, confused. He ignores her, intent on his goal, and claps his hand down on the leather jacket’s shoulder. “Hey--”

And then the guy sitting at the bar turns around, and Sam’s heart sinks back down, dislodging from where it had been stuck in his throat.

“What’s up, dude?” the guy asks, brown eyes quizzical, thin lips quirked in question.

“Sorry,” Sam says. “I thought you were someone else.”

“No worries. Happens all the time.” He turns back to his drink and Sam turns the other way, heads back to where Jess is standing with their drinks, staring at him.

“What was that?” she asks, handing over the glass in her right hand.

Sam takes a sip of his drink. “Nothing. Thought I knew that guy over there. I don’t.”

Jess frowns. “Who did you think he was?”

He sighs, looks down into his glass. “My brother.”

“Your brother? But--”

“It’s no big deal,” Sam interrupts. Jess looks at him. He knocks back the rest of his drink in one go, puts the empty glass on the table, taking away Jessica’s and putting it in the same place. “Come on. Let’s dance,” he says, pulling on her hand.

She follows even as she still tries to protest. “Sam, you need--”

“Shh,” Sam says, pulling her in against him and swaying, a bad mockery of the kind of dancing one should probably do to the type of dance pop music that’s playing. “You’re what matters,” he tells her and himself. “You’re what makes me happy.”

“Okay,” Jess agrees, “you make me happy, too. But what about your family?”

Sam thinks about what family means to him, thinks about being there to back his father and brother up, thinks about Dean ruffling his hair and calling him Sammy. Thinks about a .45 meant to kill the monsters in his closet when he was nine, thinks about John telling him to stay gone if he wanted to go, thinks about Dean letting him walk away.

He puts his nose in Jess’s hair, breathes in, doesn’t answer. He’s trying to forget someone who smelled of fire and gunpowder and home.

**.4**

Dean dreams of motel rooms a lot, the kind of dreams where everything is sort of distant and he’s not really sure what’s going on, especially once he’s woken up and the dream starts to dissolve. Sometimes, after a long day of driving, he’ll have the same kind of dream about the highway, cars cutting him off on the freeway, vehicles crushed by the side of the road, upside down, tires still spinning, but that’s really more Sam’s thing. Dean’s conscious mind focuses on the open road while his subconscious focuses on one place, while Sam is reversed, a mirror image.

The motel room never looks quite the same in his dreams--understandable, considering the amount of motels he’s stayed in over his lifetime--but the defining features are constant. Two beds, both made up with scratchy cotton bedspreads in tacky prints, a table or a desk, a TV, sometimes broken or nearly with only one fuzzy local channel and sometimes in perfect condition with a comparatively gigantic variety of channels. Varying degrees of flooring, cracked to polished tile in the bathroom, carpet in the rest of the room fraying and scratchy to clean and plush. He often wakes up with the scent of flowery motel shampoo in his nose only to discover upon taking his morning shower that it isn’t the same kind they have at this motel.

He dreams of lining the windows and doors with salt, of dismantling guns and cleaning them and putting them back together while the local news plays on the TV in the background. He dreams of fighting off monsters that have come to them, of patching up battle wounds with whiskey and gritted teeth. He dreams of twisted and sweaty sheets, of water from a low pressure shower head dripping over two bodies instead of just one.

Sometimes, and these are the worst times, there’s only one bed. He wakes up from those dreams unsettled, reaching out for Sam, because one bed means he’s on his own, reminds him of Sam being distant and unreachable in a physical way rather than just a mental or emotional one, which, if he’s honest with himself, is pretty much always.

Once he dreams that he’s trapped in a motel room with Sam, and they are looking for a way out, rattling the doorknob and trying to smash the windows open, because the taps in the bathroom are all on and they can’t turn them off and the sink and tub are filling up, overflowing, and the little rubber duck Dean stole from a garage sale for Sam when they were little is floating in the water on the floor, bobbing along without a care in the world while Dean slams himself repeatedly against the door, trying to break it down. Sam turns to Dean and says _there’s no way out we’re trapped_ only Dean can’t really hear him, just the sound of the water rushing in his ears. They stand at the foot of the bed, staring at each other, while the water fills the room faster and faster and the lights flicker and Dean thinks of ghosts and tastes salt on his tongue as the light bulbs in the lamps explode and the rubber duck gets stuck under the desk and Dean watches until the water covers it and it drowns and Sam is looking at him and saying _Dean, Dean, we’re going to die, Dean, Dean..._

And then he wakes up, disoriented, with an uncomfortable feeling that Google tells him is _reja vu_ , the feeling that something that has happened will happen again in the future, and whenever someone mentions weird dreams, he always thinks of that dream even though he tries desperately to forget about it.

If there’s one thing Sam is used to, it’s waking up in the middle of the night because he thought he heard something. When he was little, he made up stories about monsters out there in the dark and scared himself silly--and then he got older and found out they were real, that there were ways to protect yourself from them, and, well, that actually didn’t help much with the being scared thing. Just made it more manageable, maybe. Even after four years with an actual place to call home that isn’t a motel room, he still finds himself jerking awake in the early hours of the morning, ears straining for the telltale sounds of something amiss. It’s usually nothing, just the building shifting and creaking, the heat kicking in, something mundane like that, and he remembers that he’s not in the life anymore, the supernatural isn’t supposed to be chasing him now because he’s not chasing it.

This time is different.

This time he recognizes the noise, and that’s not new, but he recognizes it as someone walking around in the kitchen, and Jess is still lying next to him, so that’s definitely new.

He gets out of bed, walks quietly, mind racing a mile a minute-- _monster? robbery? serial killer? stop being stupid, Sam_ \--and when he catches sight of a silhouette, he lunges for it.

And then he’s on the floor, Dean hovering over him, _easy, tiger,_ and that is somehow both new and old, like new furniture bought at an antique store and Sam besting Dean in a fight like he’s been able to do for years in his apartment where Dean has never been.

Of course, wishing that Dean is just making a social call past two in the morning is useless, as much as Sam would like it to be true. No, Dean wants Sam to help him find Dad, like Sam doesn’t have a life he needs to live, like he hasn’t done all right on his own for four years, like the last thing John ever said to Sam wasn’t to stay gone. Like he just expects Sam to drop everything and go with him without question, family business to deal with, pack up, Sammy, let’s hit the road.

But if there’s one thing Sam is used to, it’s doing what his brother tells him to do. It may have been a long time since he saw that look on Dean’s face, but he knows it like the back of his hand, that look like all he needs is for Sam to take some of the weight for a second, just for a minute, and then he’ll be ready to keep going.

So Sam says he’ll go, just for the weekend, not putting my life on hold for you, and he slides into the car next to Dean and breathes in and it’s both new and old, new like an undergrad degree and old like the feel of worn leather under his fingertips and the sound of rattling in the vents.

It takes years for Sam to realize, and when he does, when he finally gets it, he has to lock himself in the bathroom and splash cold water on his face, stare at his face in the mirror and hate every feature, every drop of water that drips off his face to land in the sink.

Jess is gone. She’s dead, burned to ash on the ceiling, just like Mary, and Sam never knew his mother, but he did know his father, and he thinks that, actually, maybe he didn’t. Not until this moment.

He understands now. His father didn’t know what to do. His whole life was ripped away from him, the love of his life wasn’t there anymore, and he was left with his boys and his determination, and he used them. John did his best.

Sam imagines what it might be like to lose the center of your world, thinks it might feel like this only magnified tenfold, thinks that if Dean died and he had to live alone, he would snap. He splashes more water on his face, presses the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, digs his fingers into his hair.

He thinks that John Winchester was the strongest man he has ever or will ever know.

He fought with his father far too much, yelled at him and was yelled at, lamented the fact that even with all the importance of family shit John taught them, he still went off by himself, and had days when he didn’t even want to look at him. He hated his father sometimes, most times, wanted to sock him in the face for never being there for Dean or for him.

But Sam knows now, knows that John was protecting them to the best of his ability, was never going to let the last pieces of Mary he had left get hurt, even if it meant dying himself. And he was never going to let Mary’s killer get away unpunished. It was the balancing of the two that was the problem.

Sam grits his teeth, dries off his face. He is not, he _will not_ be like his father, no matter how much he understands him now. He has his priorities straight--family is number one. Dean is number one, and he won’t be blinded by his rage and end up pushing him away.

They’re in a diner in Nevada, the kind that’s on the side of the highway right at the town limits, luring in tired travellers with its battered sign promising home cooked meals. The walls are panelled wood that morphs into gaudy patterned purple and white wallpaper halfway up, matching decorative photographs lined up in an attempt to be classy that comes off as pretentious and tacky. The blinds are shut, so the lighting is dim and the atmosphere is quiet, giving off the impression that the air is filled with cigarette smoke.

Their waitress is an older lady with pinned up greying curls and a no-nonsense attitude, who pours coffee in the mugs they’ve flipped over and tells them she’ll be back for their order in a few minutes with no regard for Dean’s attempt at a flirty smile.

“They have pie,” Dean says, smiling at his menu like an idiot now. “Look, all kinds!”

“Yeah,” Sam agrees idly. It’s good to know that some things never change, no matter how long you leave them for.

The waitress comes back. Dean continues to try to flirt with her, making his order of a bacon cheeseburger sound like a proposition, and she continues to have nothing of it, just turns to Sam and asks what he’d like, sweetie, and Sam smirks at Dean and orders a barbeque ranch chicken salad, and could I get some iced tea, too, please? Thanks.

“Why are you sweetie?” Dean complains when she’s gone again. “Just because you’ve still got that whole little college boy face going on... fuckin’ jail bait, that’s what you are.”

Sam laughs. “Not anymore,” he says, winking exaggeratedly at Dean.

“Oh, shut up, sweetheart.” Dean takes a sip of his coffee, makes a face and adds more sugar--puts the dispenser down too hard, little white specks of sugar falling across the green laminate table top. Jess would hate that, Sam thinks, and the dark ocean of hurt inside him pulses in protest.

“So, what do you think we’re going to be dealing with?”

“Dunno,” Dean says. “Looks like a ghost, probably. Thought we were going to discuss this more when we got there? You doing okay?”

“I’m fine,” Sam says, and they both know he’s lying. Dean always knew Sam best, will probably always be the only one to know all of Sam.

“Iced tea,” the waitress says. Sam thanks her, gets a nod in return.

“You know it’s gonna get better,” Dean says. Sam’s turn to nod, gulp down half his glass of tea in one go.

“It’s just not so great right now. Helps that we’re working toward revenge, though.” He pauses, runs his finger through the condensation on his glass. “Helps that I’ve got you.”

Dean rolls his eyes, but his expression is otherwise serious, the set of his jaw a promise.

When their food comes Dean raves that the cheeseburger looks ‘melted to perfection indeed, honey, this’ll be just great’ and immediately steals a cucumber out of Sam’s salad. Sam shakes his head in exasperation, thinks that if losing Jess is the ocean, Dean is the bridge over it.

They’re hunting a shapeshifter and he’s wearing Dean’s skin, laughing mockingly at Sam in Dean’s voice, calling him little brother and using all the same fighting techniques that Dean does. Sam’s got his hands wrapped around the shapeshifter’s biceps, and for a second, when it grins at him, all Sam can see is Dean mock fighting with him, about to take Sam out and then jump to his feet, laughing and saying that Sam needs more practice, come on, let’s go again.

And then the moment passes as the shapeshifter twists its face into a jeering smirk, and Sam punches it in the face, feels the skin give way under his fist. The shapeshifter slams them down onto the coffee table, rolls to the floor, grunts, twists itself so that it can get its hands on Sam’s throat, and then Sam is choking, can’t breathe, at least the last thing he’s going to see is Dean’s face even if it isn’t really Dean...

Sam can hear Dean’s voice, and then the shapeshifter is gone and he can breathe, and Dean shoots the shapeshifter through the heart, once, twice, and Sam tries not to look, because even though it’s not Dean, it still looks like him, and Sam can’t handle seeing his brother dead.

Then he looks anyway, because that _thing_ pretended to be Dean, that thing thought it could take them out.

It was wrong. Things are always wrong.

Between cases, Sam and Dean travel the same way they always do, moving from motel to motel, scanning newspapers to decide which way to go, stopping at roadside diners just like always. The difference is that when they’re not on a case, they’re free to talk about things that aren’t monsters.

Not that they don’t still talk about monsters, because with a job like theirs, monsters are hard to avoid. But there’s a distinct lack of stress to their conversations, and sometimes they spend hours killing time at the same table, topping off their coffee and ignoring glares from waitstaff, talking about anything and everything. They reminisce about their best hunts, argue about the headline article of the newspaper spread between them, and make crude jokes about other people in the diner, leaning toward each other through it all because their gravities center on each other.

Sometimes they even have meaningful conversations about their feelings that end in them smiling silently at each other, ankles looped together under the table, until Dean rolls up the newspaper and hits Sam over the head with it, declaring the chick flick moment over and that it’s time to hit the road, you big bitch. Sam tells him he’s being a jerk, and they both know that it means I love you, just like it always does.

Sam is sitting in shotgun and Dean is driving the Impala, just like always, his fingers tapping along with the Metallica blasting from the speakers, matching perfectly with the place where the tape has been skipping for years. Sam keeps making a note to get Dean a new one, but he knows he never actually will. Dean wouldn’t use it, anyway, would say it sounded wrong without the skip, and Sam is inclined to agree.

He’s flipping through a guidebook to the attractions of the continental USA. It’s all marked up, pages folded over, comments made next to things on the maps like ‘stupid’ and ‘really great food’ and ‘really hot girls!!’, most of them made by Dean, some of them penciled in by John, a few entries scrawled next to in Sam’s handwriting, usually the museums. Sam’s always liked history, thought it was cool how they’d ended up here, thought it was useful to know for hunting, which was a win-win where he’s concerned.

“Wanna check out Telluride?” Sam asks, picking from the guidebook at random.

“What the fuck is a Telluride?”

Sam reads further. “A ski resort, apparently. Do you even know how to ski?”

“Of course I know how to ski,” Dean scoffs. “Do you?”

“Well, it looks really easy,” Sam says.

“Exactly,” Dean agrees. “I’ve always wanted to shack up with a ski bunny. Maybe we _should_ go there.”

“Maybe we’ll find the abominable snowman,” Sam suggests.

“Oh, come on, you know that doesn’t exist,” Dean says, rolling his eyes. “Ghosts, wendigos, sure. Bigfoot, no. Hey, maybe the resort is haunted. I’m itching for a good salt and burn, lemme tell you, Sammy.”

“You’re just scared of Bigfoot, admit it.”

“It’s not real, Sam! I can’t be scared of it!”

“Uh huh, sure.” Sam hides his smile at Dean’s infuriated scowl behind his hand, is struck by a sudden urge to tell Dean he loves him.

Dean looks over at him, sees him smiling, huffs and looks back at the road. Sam laughs and laughs, and finally Dean cracks a smile, even laughs a bit with Sam, and Sam never does tell him he loves him, because why would he do that when everything he does spells it out for him, why would he ruin it by needing to say it out loud.

Sometime after Sam gets mojo’d by the freaky asylum spirit and tries to kill Dean, and after he tries to split up with Dean and go to California and changes his mind and ends up saving his ass, they’re in a bar killing time and getting cash. Sam is leaning against the pool table, watching Dean take his shot. He’s been laughing at his brother’s terrible pool skills all night, loudly, telling anyone who would listen how his older brother probably doesn’t even have the same genes as him he’s so bad, and Dean has been, up until this moment, proving him right. The betting pool is large, and Dean is about to clean house. Sam watches as he sinks one ball, then another, another, and he’s won, and everyone who had bet is groaning and shelling out the cash, and Dean is crowing at Sam about how he _told_ him he didn’t suck, shut up, asshole!

Sam laughs and claps Dean on the shoulder, tells him it was chance, you loser, whaddya say we end the night on a high note? He shoots Dean a quick wink and Dean grins.

The second they’re back in the motel room Sam pushes Dean onto the bed, kisses him, undoes the buttons on Dean’s shirt and pushes it off along with his jacket to land on the floor. He ditches his own coat, kicks off his shoes, and crawls onto the bed next to Dean.

Dean looks at him, head tilted slightly, smile sprawling across his face. “What’s up with you?” he asks, bringing his feet up to him to unlace his boots.

Sam shrugs. “Just think you’re great.”

Dean snorts. His boots drop to the floor with a thunk. “Just think I’m a hot piece of ass, more like.”

Sam shakes his head, puts a hand on Dean’s cheek. “Think you’re amazing,” he corrects, leans in. Dean kisses him, bites at his lower lip a bit. Sam pulls back, starts dropping kisses down Dean’s neck, shuffling his body closer to Dean’s so that they’re pressed up together. “You’re not pathetic,” he says softly between kisses. “I’ll never be sick of you,” he says before pushing his hands up under Dean’s shirt, pulling it up and over his head and throwing it on the floor.

Dean wraps his own hands around Sam’s waist under his shirt, pulls him closer and kisses him again. “What about desperate?” he asks, thrusting up against Sam’s thigh. “Am I desperate?”

“No,” Sam says, trailing his hand down Dean’s chest and stopping at his jeans, unbuttoning them before continuing downward, moving his hand the way he knows Dean likes. Dean groans and flips them over, kisses Sam like he’s drowning and Sam is a life line.

“Sammy,” he says, pushing against him.

“Dean,” Sam says, measured and calm.

“Get out of those clothes so we can fuck,” Dean snaps, and Sam is instantly one hundred and ten percent more turned on than he already was and also laughing, because his brother is so fucking bossy.

He loses the clothes and loses himself in Dean, in the way Dean moves against him and the way his eyelashes spread against his cheek when he closes his eyes and the sounds he makes when he’s about to come and Sam buries his face in Dean’s neck and whispers _you’re not desperate, you’re my brother, you’re mine._

When Sam comes, every object in the room that isn’t bolted down moves an inch to the left. Neither Dean nor Sam notice.

Dean is not going to die. The doctors keep telling him otherwise, Dean keeps telling him otherwise, lying in his hospital bed with purple bruises staining his face, eyelids hooded, lips saying _I’m tired, Sammy._

Sam doesn’t care. He’s not going to let Dean die, and maybe he’s selfish because of it, maybe he should let him go because everyone has their time, but it doesn’t matter, this isn’t Dean’s time, he won’t let it be. A little electricity can’t stop a Winchester like it can stop a monster.

Dean shows up at the motel room door because he’s a stubborn motherfucker and of course he’s not going to lie back and die while watching daytime television in a hospital. Sam gets that, thinks that Dean can’t be that tired if he’s still fighting, even just that little bit.

Sam tells Dean he’s figured out a way to maybe save him. Dean says no. Sam doesn’t listen.

Of course, it was always too good to be true, a faith healer that could actually heal with the power of faith, no matter how much Sam depends on faith to get him through the day, to reassure him that the world isn’t just darkness, it’s also light. Of course it turns into a hunt, and of course Dean shoulders all the guilt of someone who thinks they should be dead, who thinks they deserve to be dead more than the pretty girl who only has a couple of months left.

Sam feels a little guilty, too, but he figures it’s worth it to keep Dean alive and kicking. Anything would be worth that.

**.5**

For months after his father makes a deal with the yellow eyed demon and dies to keep his son alive, the smell of plastic and hospital disinfectant will remind Sam of really terrible coffee spilled across the floor outside his brother’s hospital room, his father not responding no matter how hard he shook him, and the sound of a flatlining EKG readout.

The smell of salt and fire will remind Dean for months of stacking wood into a pyre, a splinter dug into the pad of his left thumb while he watches his father burn into ash in front of him and knows that it was his fault. That if he had maybe done something different, his dad would still be there for him. That’s the ideal, anyway. Dean would have been okay with dying if it meant his dad didn’t have to go to Hell.

But time heals all wounds, as they say, and Sam and Dean spend so much time in hospitals and salting and burning things that after a while they become just the smell of the hospital, just the smell of another spirit laid to rest.

Time heals all wounds, they say, but who the fuck are they? _They_ clearly don’t know anything.

No, that’s disproven in their simultaneous flinch at the sound of shattering glass, in the subtle, unspoken avoidance of semi trucks and their drivers, in the occasional nightmare where they can’t save their father--and then they jerk awake only to remember all over again that it wasn’t just a nightmare. It’s real.

Their unhealed wounds are written in the nights where Sam crawls into Dean’s bed and wraps himself around him, pressing his hand into the skin under Dean’s shirt, and Dean lets him, closes his eyes and breathes in Sammy, and they both try to forget, just for a little while.

Dean knows it’s not right, this entire world, with the pretty girlfriend and his mother alive and his dad passed away in his sleep, nice and peaceful and ideal. He can feel something off, he knows intellectually that this isn’t his life, this isn’t how it’s meant to be.

That fact is only cemented for him when he sees the memorial for the flight that he stopped from crashing, the flight that shouldn’t have crashed because he stopped it, all the headlines of people who died because there wasn’t anyone there to save them.

Even then he’s reluctant to give it up. He doesn’t want it to be his responsibility, doesn’t want to feel guilty for things he shouldn’t have any control over. Why should it be up to him? Why should he give up his mother and his father and his normal life?

The worst part, though, the worst part of the entire thing, is that Sam thinks it’s weird when he calls him Sammy, when he calls him a bitch, when he acts like they’re friends.

It’s the worst because Sam is his brother, is his best friend, is the person that knows him better than anyone else. He shouldn’t be someone who doesn’t know him at all, thinks that they have nothing in common, even if that means that he can be happy and engaged and going to law school.

It’s the worst because even though Sam looked so happy standing next to his car when he arrived in Lawrence with his fiancée, squinting in the sunlight, even though Sam looks so terrified of the monster upstairs just like a normal person would be, even though Sam can’t fight to save his life and tries to ward off intruders in the middle of the night with a baseball bat, even though Sam has his perfect life here, Dean has to make it end.

Because this isn’t real. This isn’t their real life. This isn’t an option.

Dean has bruises on his wrists from where the djinn strung him up; Sam can see them from where he’s sitting. They’re light purple at the edges, a maelstrom of pale shades of blue looping around his brother’s skin and blending into the steering wheel of the Impala where Dean is gripping it.

Dean inevitably notices Sam staring, tells him off. Sam makes a face. “Where are we going?” he asks, because he’s been wondering for a while, actually.

“Dunno,” Dean says. “Haven’t got anywhere to be.”

“Should we be looking for a hunt or...” Sam trails off, looking at Dean in question. It’s mid-morning, they’ve only been driving for maybe an hour, and the way the morning light casts shadows on Dean’s face makes him look almost ethereal.

Dean glances at Sam, tightens his knuckles around the wheel. “Nah. Kinda like going nowhere.”

“Okay. I guess we should put even more distance between us and the last place the cops knew we were, anyway.”

“Sure, Sammy,” Dean says idly. He puts his foot down on the gas, relishing the rev of his baby’s engine as she speeds up, twenty, thirty, forty miles over the speed limit on a deserted back road, and Sam grins and rolls down his window to let the crisp spring air in.

Dean chooses his route by the town names on the signs, makes bad puns about Logansport, insists they stop in Gas City for gas, and laughs when he sees Winchester on a sign. They stop for lunch in Versailles, Ohio, and Sam breaks out a terrible French accent that makes Dean roar with laughter and tell Sam to shut up, please, before my ears bleed.

“We should go to Philadelphia,” Sam says, trailing a finger across one of their beat up road maps laid on the table top.

“What for?” Dean asks through a mouthful of burger.

“Because it’s the city of brotherly love,” Sam says, waggling his eyebrows. It’s not a new joke, but it still makes Dean grin and kick him too hard under the table.

Sam asks if he can drive after lunch, and Dean says no, and Sam huffs about it but gets into shotgun without trying to insist or steal the keys like he would sometimes. Dean starts the car and looks over to Sam, who is flipping the folded up road map over and over in his hands. “Where to?” Dean asks, and Sam shrugs.

So Dean just drives, going wherever with his brother, and it ends up being one of those perfect days where they don’t think about demon blood or the possibility of Sam being evil for more than a passing moment, and Dean thinks that his life would be flawless if he could just have this all the time, every day, forget picket fences with rose bushes and all the responsibility on their shoulders.

They were too late.

Dean clings to his brother, blood seeping between his fingers where they’re pressed against the stab wound, mud soaking into his pants, begging for Sam to come back, to not do this to him, to not be gone. Sam doesn’t respond, dead weight against Dean’s shoulder, not breathing, lifeless.

Later, Dean stares at Sam’s face, peaceful and serene and wrong, and wants to tear the world down and apart, would do it even if it wouldn’t bring Sam back if it would make this go away.

He thinks of all the times he almost lost Sam, all the times they got away by the skin of their teeth, all the times Dean let Sam down, let his father down.

He had one job, and he screwed it up.

He thinks it, he stares at Sam’s still face and thinks it again, he leans his head against the wall, punches it, can’t stop thinking it, turns and tells Sammy _one job, and I’m such a fucking failure I can’t even do that god Sammy why do you even put up with me._

Dean kneels next to the mattress that Sam’s body lies on, his hands folded above him, his cheek pressed into the coarse fabric, tries to pray but doesn’t remember how or to whom he’s supposed to do it, can’t move from that spot for a long time, probably hours, and the entire time he’s talking to Sam, begging him to just come back, man, come back, because I can’t do this by myself.

All he had to do was keep Sammy safe, keep Sammy breathing, and Sammy’s not safe, was never safe because he was always dangerous underneath his skin, and Sammy’s not breathing because Dean didn’t get there in time, couldn’t stop it.

If he couldn’t do that, what the fuck is the point of him?

There isn’t one, he thinks, and in that moment he decides exactly what he’s going to do.

Dean cuts the tip of his finger on a sharp rock while digging the hole in the middle of the crossroads to bury his tin can in. It’s barely there, like a paper cut, but it bleeds like a bitch. Dean doesn’t notice until later, when he’s in the Impala again and wraps his hands around the steering wheel only to see that his hand is stained with his own blood.

He stands at the crossroad, stares around, waiting, yells until the demon shows up, and he doesn’t have time for her stupid games, Sam is dead, but he plays along anyway because she’s his ticket to getting Sam back. He doesn’t have time for her stupid games, and she knows it, because she turns down ten years, eight, five, and tells him he can have one, and he takes it because he knows she’ll never give him Sammy back if he doesn’t, and that just isn’t an option.

When he kisses her she tastes like sulphur and heat and promise.

He drives back to where he left Sam, barely breathing, fingers tapping on the wheel and toes tapping inside his boots, terrified that she was lying, that when he gets back Sam will still be lying motionless on the dilapidated mattress and Dean will still have failed, will still have lost everything he’s spent his entire life trying to keep.

She wasn’t. Sam is standing, looking in the mirror, breathing, alive, and Dean grabs him and hugs him, squeezes too hard because Sammy is alive, he didn’t let Sammy down this time.

**.6**

The first time they have sex after Sam finds out about the deal, it’s hard and angry, Sam’s teeth marking up Dean’s body and Dean pushing him against the wall, fucking against him like it’s the last time he’ll ever get to do it. It makes every inch of Dean’s skin sing, his brain overload until nothing’s left but _Sam, Sam, Sam,_ and he holds on to the fact that he’s still got a year left, an entire year, and his baby brother will keep on breathing long past that, and everything is okay because of that, because of the way Sam’s hands grip him too hard, the way Sam is clearly claiming him, making him entirely Sam’s, and Dean wants to tell him that he doesn’t have to do that, that it’s already true, but he can’t make himself choke out the words, so he stays quiet, lets Sam touch him however he wants to, leave whatever marks he wants.

Sam is angry--he wants to lay bruises all over Dean’s skin, beat him up for being such a stupid fucking idiot, hold him close and never let him go, mine, mine, mine. He can’t forget, no matter how hard he tries to focus on Dean and only Dean, only the skin laid out in front of him. He can’t stop picturing a demon hiding, just out of sight, waiting to snatch Dean away from him and take him to Hell, where Sam can’t get to him. Even counting Dean’s freckles doesn’t help, the numbers turning into seconds that Sam has left to save his brother, has until he’s lost everything.

Fuck that, he thinks, lying next to Dean, fingers still tangled up in his hair, legs still entwined with his. Even if Dean does go to Hell, and he won’t be if it’s up to Sam, Sam will still be able to get to him. He won’t rest until he’s broken into Hell and dragged Dean back out, he won’t stop until they’re together, they’re okay.

And that’s only his last resort. If there’s something on this Earth that can break the deal, Sam will find it, no matter how much Dean begs him not to try, tells him not to try, tells him he’ll die if he does. Sam doesn’t care. Nothing is more important than saving Dean anymore. Nothing. The world can fucking burn for all Sam cares.

Dean walks into a motel room lit up with colourful strings of Christmas lights, soft warm lamp light behind it, and Sam’s smile shining brighter than all of it.

It’s the perfect Christmas for a Winchester--in a motel room, cheap decorations and presents from the gas station, eggnog that’s more whiskey than eggnog. Anyone else would think it a terrible holiday, but the Winchesters don’t get holidays, they don’t get to celebrate things. They can’t, like Sam said, they’ve got too much going on, they’ve got too much weighing on their shoulders.

But for one moment, they shed all of that, clinking plastic cups together and wishing each other a merry Christmas, settling back to watch the game. It’s Dean’s last Christmas, he thinks, and it’s perfect, it’s exactly what he wanted--nothing extreme, just an acknowledgement, just a moment out of their lives to sit back and breathe.

Sam is still in denial. This won’t be the last time he tells his brother merry Christmas, because he’s not going to let his brother die.

They’re not pretending everything is okay. They know that it’s not. It’s just that for now, for right now, it doesn’t matter.

The first time is at night, in the dark, bullet through the chest, and Dean is bleeding out, dead too soon, and Sam is lost, he doesn’t know what to do, and then he wakes up.

The last time is in the morning, broad daylight, bullet through the chest, and it doesn’t matter how many times Sam has seen Dean die by now, he’ll never get used to it, never stop clinging to his unresponsive body and trying to bring him back.

Sam closes his eyes, waits to wake up, opens them to see Dean’s face, closes his eyes again, waits. He opens his eyes again. It’s Wednesday. He thought it was over.

Dean is still dead.

Sam gets up off the parking lot pavement, packs the car, drives away to bury his brother.

Then he starts hunting.

For six months, Sam thinks of nothing but the Trickster. He organizes the weapons, he makes his bed with perfect hospital corners, he counts his brushstrokes when he brushes his teeth, he eats meticulously and only because it’s necessary to keep hunting. He charts everything, he studies the lore on Tricksters until he’s memorized the exact wording of he doesn’t know how many books. He stitches up the wounds from hunts he only does because they’re in his way and why not, why does it matter.

He encounters other hunters sometimes. He sees the way they look at him, knows what they must think of him, and he doesn’t care. He can hear them whispering about how he’s gone off the deep end, won’t be around much longer, and once someone, a tall man with shaggy hair who’s new to the business and therefore doesn’t know the Winchesters, tells him _you must have been in love_ and Sam looks at him and thinks _if love feels like pain I’m still in it._

Bobby calls and calls and calls, leaving message after message, and Sam ignores them all until he doesn’t.

It’s not Bobby, of course. Sam knew it wouldn’t be. He begs the Trickster, considers curling up in the ball on the floor and sobbing like he hasn’t in six months, ultimately doesn’t have to.

He wakes up, finally, _I gotta get back in time_ ringing in his ears like trumpets at the gates of Heaven, and he walks straight to Dean and clings to him, breathes him in, and thinks _it’s not over yet._

The Impala is parked on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere northern Wisconsin. It’s the dead of night on a little used back road, the stars spread out like tiny holes in the velvet black blanket of the sky. Dean and Sam are sitting on the hood of the car, beers in hand, nowhere to be, and it feels just like every other time they’ve parked the Impala somewhere and looked at the stars, except this time Dean is going to die.

It’s not just an inevitable thing that will happen sometime in the distant future. It’s got an expiry date, a calling card in the form of the howls of hellhounds, a countdown clock that continues to tick constantly in the back of Sam’s mind.

Sam knocks his shoulder against Dean’s to reassure himself that his brother’s still there and takes a drink of his beer. Dean glances over at him. “We’re not far from a national forest,” he says. “Wanna go camping in the woods, Sammy?”

The Chequamegon covers nearly one hundred thousand acres of land. It’s a lot of forest, and Sam has a fleeting thought that if they hide themselves deep enough in the trees, stay quiet and out of the way, the hellhounds won’t be able to find Dean. It’s stupid, obviously, but Sam’s chest hurts with how much he wants it to be possible.

“Remember when we went camping in Washington that time?” Sam asks.

“Yeah,” Dean says. “You were a whiny little bitch about it, and Dad had to make a deal with you that you’d be in a town by the time school started.” He snorts a laugh, takes a drink.

“It was fun, though,” Sam says. “You threw me in the river.” Dean had jumped in after him, too, pinned him to a fallen tree that stretched across the rushing water, kissing droplets from Sam’s face while Sam laughed.

Dean smiles. Sam stares at him, considers that there will be a time (less than five months from now, his clock helpfully provides) that Dean won’t be there to smile at shared memories with him, wants to cry. He takes a drink instead, looking away from Dean’s face.

“So, camping?”

“It’s January, Dean. We’re crazy enough to sit out in the cold like this.”

Dean shrugs. “The winter sky beats the summer one.” He waves his free hand at the stars. “And I like the cold.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “We’re still not going camping.”

“Spoilsport,” Dean says. “C’mere.”

Sam raises his eyebrows, gestures to the press of their upper arms and thighs together. “I’m here.”

Dean huffs, sits up and leans toward Sam, one arm propped against the windshield behind him, balancing his beer bottle against the glass. “No,” he says. “Come _here_.” Sam leans in, lets Dean kiss him, cold press of lips against lips. “Stop thinking about it,” Dean whispers into the space between them.

“Thinking about what?” Sam says, tone teasing, and kisses Dean again, deeper this time. Dean smiles against his mouth, and Sam tries to forget about it, tries to block out the imagined sound of seconds ticking by, tries to pretend that this moment can last forever, that he’ll never have to let Dean go, but the seconds slip past, the stars shrink into nothing, and Dean is going to die.

Dean crawls into Sam’s bed one night, lies on his back next to him until Sam shifts, rolls over and opens his eyes.

“Dean?” he asks, voice sleep hoarse. “What are you doing?”

He looks over at Sam, closes his eyes for a moment before opening them again. “Sammy,” he says, “I’m going to die.”

Sam’s eyes widen.

“I don’t want you to think that I regret my decision, because I don’t. I don’t, because you’re alive. But Sam...” He trails off, turns on his side and grabs Sam by the collar of his shirt, fists his hand in it and feels the warmth radiating off his brother, so different from how cold his body had been on the mattress in that motel room almost a year ago.

“You don’t want to die,” Sam says quietly. Dean doesn’t say anything, doesn’t move. “That’s normal, Dean, that’s--”

“Shut up, Sammy.”

Sam shuts up, studies his brother’s face for a moment in the dark, shifts closer and wraps his arm around Dean’s waist. Dean lets out a shuddering breath, lets go of Sam’s shirt and moves his hand to Sam’s back, buries his face in Sam’s neck.

“What do you want me to do?” Sam asks.

“Nothing,” Dean says immediately. “Don’t do anything. Just stay still. Keep breathing.”

Sam can do that, that’s easy, easy as long as Dean is next to him, touching him, breathing as well. He thinks it probably won’t be as easy without Dean, thinks that it would be fucking hard, actually, and he knows that from experience, six months of it, six months that never really happened except for how they did. That’s why he’s determined to do something, anything, to stop it from happening again.

“I don’t know what to do,” Sam says. He’s not referring to what he said before, and Dean knows it but pretends not to.

“Just kiss me,” he says. “Make me stop thinking about it.”

Sam can do that, that’s easy. It’s the idea that, someday, soon, really soon, there won’t be a Dean to crawl into his bed and kiss him anymore that makes it hard.

The clock is still ticking. Sam is still trying to make it stop.

**.7**

_You have to kill me,_ Sam says, like it’s an option, like it’s something Dean could actually do, like it’s not the thing that he hates his father most for saying. _Promise me_ , Sam says, and Dean promises, but he can’t mean it, he can’t.

Of course, he doesn’t have to. Jake does it for him, and Dean can’t even take that, has to make a deal to bring Sam back, give up his soul for his baby brother and he doesn’t even feel an ounce of regret, except for maybe the look on Sam’s face when he finds out Dean only has a year to live, the look on Sam’s face when he realizes that this is it, this is the moment that Dean dies and there’s no way to stop it.

Somewhere in the four months that Dean is in Hell, Sam sits in the front seat of the Impala, on the right side, closes his eyes so that he can’t see the iPod jack he’d installed, and breathes in the last traces of his brother left on the jacket he’d dug out of the trunk, out of the bottom of Dean’s bag. It barely fits Sam, would probably be big on Dean, but it smells just like him, leather under Sam’s fingers the ghost of Dean’s skin.

_You have to kill me_ , Sam had said, and maybe Dean had actually fulfilled the promise, because Sam doesn’t feel like he’s living anymore.

Sam has never really blamed other people for being dead. It was never Jessica’s fault that she died, that was Sam’s fault if anyone’s. It wasn’t his father’s fault that he died, he was just trying to make up for all his faults by keeping Dean alive. It was never any of the ghosts’ faults for dying in the first place.

It’s not Dean’s fault he’s dead. It’s Sam’s, because he’s the one who died first, he’s the one Dean made the deal for, he’s the one who couldn’t save Dean.

Sometimes, though, sometimes he catches himself thinking that it would be all right if Dean hadn’t made the stupid fucking deal, had just let Sam be dead, and then he’d still be alive and Sam wouldn’t be alone. Sam doesn’t know what Heaven’s like, doesn’t even know if there is a Heaven that he went to, but he thinks that if there is, it was probably fine, and he could have just waited for Dean there.

So he doesn’t really blame Dean, except when he does, and those times are the times when he gets particularly crazy, the times when he tries to make a deal with a demon, the times when he tries to kill Lilith by himself, the times Ruby has to show up and stop him, has to hold him until he stops trying to destroy himself and everything else, and then she offers him fries with a side of demon blood like that will make him feel better.

Sometimes the things Ruby says remind Sam so much of Dean that he has to stop for a second to catch his breath. He’s not quite sure whether he loves those moments or hates them, thinks that maybe it doesn’t really matter because it’s not like he’s being reminded. He hasn’t forgotten. There isn’t a single moment that passes that Sam isn’t thinking about Dean, trying to figure out how to bring him back, trying to figure out how to keep on living without him, trying not to think about him and defeating the purpose.

He tries not to think about Dean when he’s having sex with Ruby, when he’s drinking the blood from her veins and watching it smear over the sheets of the motel room bed after she pulls away, when he feels like the world has been laid at his feet since he was six months old and Azazel dripped those first, fateful drops of blood into his mouth.

He thinks about Dean anyway, thinks about how everything is for him, everything is so that if he can’t bring Dean back, he can at least do what they were trying to do, save the world, stop the apocalypse.

Sam was cursed from the beginning, destiny written in blood, and he feels like it’s got him wrapped up tight while he struggles at the bonds, tries to use the ropes against themselves in order to slip through their grasp, like if they just get tighter, they’ll snap and he’ll be free.

Ruby tells him that what he’s doing is right, is how he’s going to live up to his brother’s memory, is how he’s going to strike back against Hell for what they did to him, took from him. He believes her because he wants it to be true, he wants to be doing the right thing, he wants to be good enough for Dean.

Mostly he just wants his big brother back to tell him what to do.

Sometimes Sam sobs into motel room pillows. It's usually when he hasn’t seen Ruby for a while, when the taste of her blood on his tongue is all he can think about, the need for it crawling under his skin.

He never cries, because he knows if he lets a single tear out, he won't be able to stop.

He feels like the worst kind of failure, the kind of failure that has failed because he didn't know how not to. He _is_ a failure, he knows it like he knows the sound of Dean's sleep heavy breathing from the other side of a dark room, the sound he won't ever hear again because Dean is in Hell, because Dean sold his soul to keep Sam alive.

Sam wishes Dean had realized what it would do to Sam to live without his brother. It tears into him that Dean probably didn't realize because he didn't think he meant the same thing to Sam as Sam does to him. But he does, he means safety and home and knowing what his place in the world is. He means knowing how to live because his brother was living too.

The world without Dean may as well be a world with water for air, slowly drowning Sam, filling his lungs one desperate breath at a time. In that world, Ruby is driftwood, the thing Sam's grabbed onto to try to keep his head above water, her blood the oxygen he craves. But there's never enough, it's never right, and Sam doesn't know, he doesn't know, doesn't know.

So he sobs into his pillows in the dark and gets up at daybreak. Continues to live because Dean asked him to, trying to carve himself a new place in the world with a blade against Ruby's skin because she offered him this and he desperately, desperately needs to somehow make it okay.

**.8**

The first thing Dean knows after the Hellhound ripping him apart like a particularly good steak dinner is darkness and the smell of dirt in his nostrils, heady and overwhelming.

He fumbles for his lighter, flicks it on, realizes where he is. He yells for help, pounds on the wooden boards above him until his hands are scraped raw and he can feel the dirt falling over him. He pushes through it, strategic displacement so that he can breathe what little oxygen there is and dig his way out until his hands emerge from the ground, warmed by the light from the sun.

Dean drags himself out of his grave and onto browning grass, lies there panting because digging your way out of your grave is fucking hard work, stares at the red light glowing on the inside of his eyelids.

He forces himself to his feet and blinks his eyes open, squinting against the light, and surveys the felled trees circling his grave. _Demons,_ is his first thought, and then he’s angry, rage against the inside of his skin, _damn it, Sammy, I told you no._

It is a novelty, though, being alive when you should be dead and buried. Dean thinks about that as he walks down the first road he’d come across, dust bursting up in clouds behind his feet, and while he stares at his scar free skin in the mirror, and when he finds a handprint on his shoulder, and while he’s collecting the essentials for life from the abandoned gas station, things he’d never thought he’d have again: a body and food and water and porn and money.

It feels familiar and satisfying and terrifying to line the dirty windowsill with salt, weird and unsettling in the best way to listen to the high pitched screeching of who knows the fuck what try to destroy his eardrums, shattering glass falling around him like an attempt to compose a symphony. For a second he thinks it was all a trick, like maybe he’s in Hell and Hell thinks it’s funny to make him think he’s still alive four months later, but then it stops and he pushes that thought from his mind.

Suddenly all he wants in the entire world, all he wants from being alive, is to see Sam.

Of course, the fucker’s changed his number, and Bobby won’t believe it’s him and Dean has to drive to South Dakota from the middle of fucking nowhere and convince him that he’s back, and all in all he’s been alive for more than a day by the time he finally gets to see Sam’s face.

And then, of course, Sam tries to attack him, but in the end Dean gets to wrap his arms around his brother again, and in comparison to the birds he’d seen flying outside his stolen car that he had been so enamoured with because he hadn’t ever thought he’d see birds again and the taste of a shitty energy bar that had been like gourmet food, Sam’s hands are like magic, like the force of a waterfall at the end of a river dropping him into real life, into believing that he’s alive, that this isn’t a dream.

Sam is standing at the bottom of a six foot deep hole, clearing the last of the dirt away from the top of the wooden coffin. It’s still shiny underneath the dirt, brand new, only put in the ground maybe a month ago.

“I am not looking forward to opening that,” Dean says from above Sam, crouching next to the hole in the ground, looking down at him, his face streaked with dirt. “I swear, we should get paid for this shit.”

“We do get paid,” Sam says. “Sorta.”

“I’m not seeing the money rolling in,” Dean says. “Just a whole lotta pressure to save the world. Man, I miss when salt and burns were all we really had to worry about.”

“No,” Sam agrees, propping his shovel on the dirt and leaning on it, looking up at his brother. “But we save people, right? There must be hundreds of people that are alive because of us, tons of people that have told us thank you, that they can’t ever possibly repay us.”

There’s something constant in the way the people they save say thank you, something commonplace about their heartfelt _thank yous_. Dean shrugs. “I guess.”

“What,” Sam asks, “you don’t think it’s worth it?”

“Nah, I think it’s worth it,” Dean says, getting to his feet. “I just wouldn’t mind rolling in piles of cash. It’s normal, I hear. Now, how about we crack this bad boy open and set this spirit to rest?”

Sam rolls his eyes, wipes at his forehead, makes a face at the dirt it spreads on his hand, and tosses his shovel out of the grave. “I finished digging,” he says. “You get to open it.”

Dean shakes his head. “Bitch.”

“Jerk,” Sam says.

Dean has no idea what the fucking point of this is, why Castiel keeps showing up and telling him to stop it and then disappearing again, but if he can save his parents, if he can stop the yellow eyed demon, then he’s damn well going to try his hardest to do it.

At first it’s kind of fun, seeing his father’s young face, weathered a bit by the war but not nearly as much as Dean is used to. He convinces him that the Impala is a much better choice than the Volkswagen because it’s true, because Dean could never imagine his life without the Impala in it.

He’s enamoured with his mother, with her gorgeous waves of shiny blond hair, this young woman he barely recognizes except when she smiles across the table at John, and then there’s no mistaking who she is. They look happy, this couple in this diner, and he vaguely wants to cry when he thinks about how unhappy their future is, sets in steel how much he wants to change it for them.

He never knew that Mary was such a fucking badass, either, but it somehow doesn’t surprise him.

Of course, in trying to save them, he discovers the point of this. The point is that he can’t. He can’t save them. He can’t stop their lives from becoming exactly what Mary didn’t want them to be, growing up in the life, knowing that there are monsters out there in the dark and that one of them got its hands on them, got its blood inside Sam, ripped their family apart by the seams.

And while Dean is in the 1970s trying to stop it before it happens, Sam is with Ruby, still on his downslide into no one knows what, still playing into the game that Azazel was setting up the pieces for, even though Azazel is dead now.

Sam’s mouth tastes like dirt and metal, his throat burns with thirst, and he thinks he can smell blood somewhere, maybe his own, maybe a hallucination like Alastair and his younger self and his mother.

He’s starting to think maybe Dean is right, maybe he should be locked up, maybe the demon blood really isn’t a good idea, even if it’s the only way he can see to kill Lilith. Maybe embracing the monster side of him, the side that’s been plaguing him since as long as he can remember, wasn’t the right idea. Maybe it made him something to be hunted rather than a hunter.

Except how can that be? How does that make any sense? It’s the fucking apocalypse, and Sam has the key to stopping it, the powers that can defeat Lilith and stop Lucifer from rising, save the world, save Dean. He has the power to win this, the only thing that makes him feel complete, feel right.

So when the door opens, Sam leaves. Hotwires a car, leaves Bobby knocked out in the salvage yard, drives off. He’s going to save everyone, damn what anyone else says. Dean says he’s a monster? He’ll fucking be a monster if that’s what it takes. Even if Dean thinks of him as nothing, Sam doesn’t care. Dean is everything, and Sam is trying his best.

**.9**

The angels want Sam to say yes, of course. They want him to let Lucifer possess him in order to have their big apocalypse prizefight, and they want him to die, because they want paradise.

_Yeah, well, what about paradise for me? What about what I want?_ is what Sam has to say to that, what he doesn’t bother saying because it’s not like douchebag angels or anyone else give a fuck.

Sam was possessed once. He knows what it’s like. He’s not keen to experience it again. With Meg it was like darkness controlling all his limbs, listening to his own voice laugh mockingly, being stifled and blind and trapped within himself. Wrong, bad, wrong, and somehow familiar. With a fallen angel, he imagines, with the worst kind of evil inside him, he thinks it would feel like blinding light drowning him out, like being frozen and feeling himself move at the same time, like pain and pain and pain and knowing that it was his own fault. Like coming home, like being complete, maybe, but he would be screaming the entire time, because without Dean he is nothing and trapped inside his body he can’t have Dean.

Like being strapped to a comet, Jimmy Novak had told them. Who would choose that? They would need a good fucking reason.

The angels think that playing to the Winchesters need to save the world will work. They think that they can make the Winchesters agree that destroying only half the world, only a few million people, is better than Hell on Earth, everyone destroyed, demons, demons everywhere.

That’s not good enough. The Winchesters want to save everyone.

Well, really, they want to save each other, because without each other, what’s the point?

_There’s gotta be a better way_ , they say, and they won’t take no for an answer.

Jimmy said yes because he wanted to serve the beings he’d had so much faith in his entire life, wanted his life to mean something, as long as he was promised that his family would be safe. He said yes again because he didn’t want his daughter to suffer, despite the fact that Castiel had broken his promises and lied to Jimmy.

_Save the world,_ the angels say. _You can save everyone. You started this, you can end this._

Sam thinks that maybe if they said _Save your brother_ it would sway him a little.

He wonders if that makes him a bad person, that one person means more to him than seven billion.

Dean knows how this ends. Well, he knows how it’s supposed to end.

It’s supposed to end in metal springs where there once was a mattress, red spray paint graffiti spelling out nightmares a story high, a beaten up car, and a drugged up ex-angel. It’s supposed to end in torture, in worthless sacrifice of friends, in a world torn to pieces containing only those it’s chewed up and spat back out. It’s supposed to end with another scorned angel in an impeccably white suit standing amid the wreckage wearing the skin of Dean’s little brother and smiling at Dean like he thinks the teensy weensy human is so stupid it’s cute.

True to his nature, if there is one thing Dean Winchester wants to do, it’s prove that son of a bitch wrong. And hey, while he’s at it, he might as well screw what Zachariah says, too.

Dean Winchester is out to create an ending that he approves of. An ending with Lucifer rotting in his cage, Castiel fully mojo’d up, the world in one piece with little children running around playing in the park, not attacking humans in dirty back alleys. An ending where Sam is alive and whole and himself.

A lot of Dean’s life hasn’t so much been based on choices. He didn’t choose for a demon to kill his mother and his father to raise him like a marine. He didn’t choose to love his brother more than he loves anyone or anything else. He didn’t choose to be Michael’s vessel. He did choose to go to Hell for his brother, but he didn’t choose to be pulled back out again.

He won’t choose to kill his brother, and he won’t choose to be Michael’s prom dress.

So he calls Sam, hands over Ruby’s knife instead of stabbing him with it, puts him back in shotgun where he belongs. They are going to make their own future, because now they have a choice.

All that matters is trying to make the right one.

Dean is driving the Impala toward their next case, a new lead on the Colt that will probably turn out to be nothing because the universe hates the Winchesters, and it’s dark outside, cloudy, the only light the headlights illuminating the road and bouncing off the road reflectors in the center of the highway.

It’s quiet, too, quiet except for the sound of the engine and of Sam breathing in the seat next to Dean, his eyes closed and his hands folded on his lap, clearly not sleeping.

_I’m glad you’re here_ , Dean thinks. He doesn’t say it because he doesn’t want to break the quiet with the sound of his voice, doesn’t want to hear it grating against the smooth harmony of the road. He doesn’t say it because it doesn’t need to be said, not really, and because he thinks that if he sits here and listens hard enough, he might be able to hear Sam’s heart beating, that steady sound that signifies how very alive Sam still is.

It stays the same for the next twenty miles, and just when Dean thinks he might actually be hearing Sam’s heartbeat, Sam says, “I can hear your heart beating.”

Dean blinks, startled, says, “That’s not creepy at all, Sammy.”

“Not really,” Sam says. “If your heart is beating I know you’re alive.”

Dean can’t argue with that one, can’t argue with it at all, really, since he hasn’t got a leg to stand on except his stubbornness. “Whatever.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Sam says, looking over at Dean. Dean glances at him out of the corner of his eye, steadfastly looks back at the road. Sam smirks a bit. “You were totally thinking the same thing.”

“Shut up, I was not. I’m not a girl like you, Samantha.”

“Yeah, okay, Deanna.”

“I hate you.”

“I know. I hate you, too.”

On their last night on Earth before they go up against the devil, Bobby forces them all to line up for a picture. They’re all smiling and laughing at first, but when the reality of the situation hits them, straightforward words from Castiel’s mouth, their smiles disappear.

The result of their suicide mission is two people dead, neither of them the devil, and their faces stare out at them from the photo, sullen and dull and nothing like what they looked like when they were alive.

The fire burns the photo, curls it up at the edges, and Sam thinks of the hardware store exploding, the feel of the heat even from where they were, yards away.

Later, when they’re up in the room with the two beds, the one they’ve shared since they were little, they walk toward each other and meet in the middle of the room, Sam gripping Dean’s biceps while Dean’s hands wrap around the back of Sam’s neck, their foreheads pressed together. Sam squeezes his eyes shut, tries to forget about Lucifer jeering at him, telling him that he’s going to say yes, it’s not a question, it’s an inevitability, about all the people in Carthage, Missouri who died so that Lucifer could raise Death. Dean holds on to his brother, thinks about Lucifer falling to the ground, bullet through his skull, and then getting back up and laughing at them, laughing at everything they’ve been through, everything they’ve lost, everything they continue to put themselves through.

He thinks about Ellen, determined to stay with her daughter, sacrificing herself so that Sam and Dean could have a chance at the devil, about how that sacrifice was practically worthless in the grand scheme of things, but infinitely priceless in regards to how much she was worth to them.

He thinks about Jo, thinks about her laughing in his face and telling him she has a little self-respect, thank you, about when he first met her and she held a shotgun to his back, about the last time he saw her, bleeding out on the dirty hardware store floor and still, still fighting, still telling them to keep on going.

And they will, Dean thinks, tightening his grip on Sam. They’ll keep on going because this is what they do, this is how they live, this is all they know.

But that’s tomorrow. Right now they’ll hold on to each other and recenter themselves in the world, stare into each other’s eyes and hope all they see there is each other and not their monsters. Right now they can take a moment to scream silently together, and tomorrow they’ll get up and keep on going, just like Jo and Ellen would want them to.

Dean can remember the first time he helped patch Sam up--it was when they were younger and living in a trailer on the bad side of town. Sam had convinced a kid next door to let him borrow his bike, except he didn’t know how to ride one, so he’d barely even gotten on it before he fell off, scraped his knees raw and bloody, ran crying back to his father.

Dean had sat anxiously beside his father, handing him wet cloth torn from old shirts to wipe up Sammy’s knee with, had held Sam’s hand while John applied antibacterial gel and a band-aid to the wound.

It’s routine by now, fixing up their various cuts and bruises, gunshot wounds and concussions. They don’t usually have antibacterial gel anymore, preferring to just dump a bit of whiskey on their particularly bad open wounds, use the rest as a painkiller.

This time they were in a cemetery when Sam got thrown into a headstone, tore his wrist open on the sharp edge of it, hit the dirt groaning. Dean killed the demon who did it, stabbed him with Ruby’s knife, and then gathered Sam up, drove him back to the motel room and parked him next to the bathroom sink with orders to hold this towel to your arm and don’t fucking move, you hear me?

“You gotta be more careful,” Dean says, pulling the stitches through Sam’s skin. “Don’t wanna have you ruined completely. Anymore than you already are, I mean.”

Sam snorts, rolls his eyes. “I’ll try, Dean, thanks.”

“Damn straight,” Dean says. He finishes up the last of the stitches and takes the bottle of whiskey Sam is holding away from him, dumping a generous helping of it over Sam’s arm before taking a drink himself and handing it back to Sam. “You think you need a bandage, too?”

Sam squints. “Probably. At least for a bit.”

Dean nods, gets out the white gauze and starts wrapping it around Sam’s arm, once, twice, three times before cutting it and taping it on. “And don’t scratch,” he says, a parody of all the times he said the same words to Sam when he was little and loved to pick at his scabs.

“‘Course not,” Sam mumbles. “Thanks.”

“S’my job, Sammy, not a problem. Just don’t do it again.”

“I won’t,” Sam says, an obvious false statement, considering their lifestyle, but the intent is there for what it is, and when Dean smiles at him, Sam smiles back.

Sam’s swimming in the motel pool because why the fuck not, they never do anymore and he’s got fuck all to do while Dean hangs out at the bar and picks up a chick or something. He drifts in the water, dunks his face in and shakes the water off, then lets himself sink.

He opens his eyes when he’s on the bottom, stares up through the blue tinted water at the dark sky spread above him. He thinks about the first time he’d done this, how he’d been secretly hoping Dean would pull him out and yell at him so that he would know that Dean was still paying attention. He hadn’t been disappointed, if he remembers correctly, only Dean had been so mad he’d stopped talking to Sam for a good few days, so it hadn’t worked out quite how he’d wanted.

His lungs start to burn with the need for oxygen, and he thinks about how Lucifer had promised that even dying wouldn’t stop him, that if he died Lucifer would just bring him back. No way to escape, and isn’t that a depressing thought, that Sam doesn’t even have that much control over his own body, his own destiny.

He doesn’t even know why he still expects it after all this time being denied it.

Sam closes his eyes, stops holding his breath, breathes in the water.

The next thing he knows he’s spitting the water on the side of the pool and Dean is yelling at him, telling him _no, no, Sammy, you don’t get to check out on me, you don’t get to leave me alone_ , and Sam hacks a weak chuckle, says _I can’t, he won’t let me. I don’t get to stop even if I want to,_ clutching to Dean’s jacket and soaking Dean’s clothes with water from the pool.

He apologizes for that. Dean tells him to shut up. Sam understands.

Sam is screaming. He’s not making any noise, but he’s screaming, screaming for Lucifer to stop. He’s been screaming since he said yes, been trying to get control, trying to move Lucifer toward the pit and then just trying to move, trying to see through the frosted haze, trying to breathe through the stifling cold taking up every corner of his body even though he doesn’t need to breathe, souls don’t need to breathe, and Lucifer is taking care of his body, keeping it in pristine condition to traipse around and destroy the world in.

To kill Michael in, and Sam doesn’t want that to happen, feels a pang at the sight of Adam’s face looking not like Adam at all even though Sam doesn’t even know Adam that well, at the sight of his face going up in flames, at the sight of Castiel bursting into pieces, dead because he chose his own path.

And then Lucifer is beating up Dean, Lucifer is _killing Dean_ , and what the hell is Dean even doing here? Why is he here, why did he bring the Impala, Lucifer is only going to destroy him, destroy the only home Sam has ever known, his brother and that car with vents that rattle and an engine that still runs like a dream despite having been destroyed time and time again because Dean always fixed it, Dean always made everything right again, Dean has always been there, Dean is telling him everything is okay... _Dean is telling him everything is okay._

Sam stops his fist mid-air, slowly unclenches his fingers, ignores Lucifer’s protests, pushes the cold away, thinks of warm summer nights curled up in the backseat of the Impala with Dean as his blanket, the heat of the hood of the car after it’s been sitting in direct sunlight. He knows what he has to do. He tells Dean that it’s okay, because it is, this is what they planned, it just didn’t go quite right, but it’s working now.

He opens the door to the cage. And then he jumps, Michael grabbing onto him at the last second so that Sam has to drag him down with them, drag his little brother down into the pits of Hell when he should be spending eternity in Heaven, and it’s terrible, it’s terrible that they’re going to be stuck in a cage for the rest of forever, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it because he finally did something right, and as he hits what serves as the ground in the cage, permafrost that’s been building up since Lucifer was cast down, part of him thinks that maybe, just maybe, he’ll be rewarded for it. Maybe he won’t have to stay here forever. Maybe he’ll see Dean again someday.

**.10**

Sam and Dean. Dean and Sam. The Winchesters. A package deal, always have been, always will be. Growing up in each other’s pockets and learning to live with each other every second turned into not being able to live without the other for more than a day. Stitched clumsily together with fire, blood, sweat, tears, salt, dirt, alcohol--and most of all love.

Theirs is a love that has saved the world time and time again, a love that has defied millennia of carefully laid out plans, been to Hell and to Heaven and back again.

It’s their love, more than anything else, that makes them so strong.

Ghosts, vampires, werewolves, skinwalkers, wendigos, demons, angels--all of them fear the Winchesters at least a little bit. And for good reason: when you’re a monster, when you’re older than the dawn of time, what the Winchesters have just doesn’t make any sense, and the unknown is terrifying.

No matter how many times they tried to go their separate ways, how many times Sam decided he needed out, how many times Dean decided they were only bringing each other down, they always found their way back to each other. No matter how many times it seemed like everything was lost, they prevailed.

Not even throwing themselves into the deepest circles of Hell can stop them from finding their way back to each other. They belong on the road together, and fuck whoever thinks they can get in between them, good intentions or bad.

Rubber black skid marks on the roads crisscrossing the States, towels stained with blood on motel room floors, salt lines and devil’s traps and banishing sigils drawn on walls in various buildings, diner waitresses that marked down the bill for those two cuties by the window, bar pool tables with gouges from guys that lost all their money slamming their cues down, cemeteries with freshly dug graves marked with stones dated decades ago--these are the things that the Winchesters leave behind. These are the things that the Winchesters will always come back to.

Sam and Dean in the Impala. Saving people, hunting things.

**Author's Note:**

> If you didn't look at the art yet, [OFF YOU GO.](http://marciaelena.livejournal.com/311287.html)
> 
> Thanks to my beta, Lexy, and my cheerleaders, Becca, Glenda, and Calley. And to you, for reading!


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